Darkman, Walkin Dude writes: A new airship design looks set for production after its manufacturers secured a £300 million contract with the US military, the heavier than air Hybrid Air Vehicle has the potential to realise the potential of airships which has long been overlooked after the initial teething problems earlier last century. With a carrying capacity of over a thousand tons and the ability to deliver that cargo to any location on earth, able to stay in the air for up to three weeks at a time, we could soon see Bladerunner-style airships in the skies overhead.

Really? You'd rather look at a bright monitor for reading purposes than a book? Wow. The ipad is a pretty toy, but that's the limit of it. Yes, you can use it for constructive work, but you can use a bag of lego for constructive work if you really want to. Even the interface is non optimal, one of the first computers I owned, the Spectrum ZX81, had buttons that were near flush with the computer for typing. It didn't work then and it doesn't work now, tactile feedback is Just Easier.

Before too long people will get tired of the shiny and drift on to something new, maybe apple will be there waiting with that something new, I don't know. This isn't speaking against apple as such, they have an unrivalled marketing department, just an assessment of the practical realities.

They then had to spend another fifty hours travelling, since the things you hunt tend to move away from you, and the fruit growing wild is a lot more sparse than you'd find in a farm, with the possible exception of tropical areas.

How is it cheaper to explore, drill, fail, and repeat numerous times for fossil fuels before finding something, lay down sub oceanic pipelines or move it via massive freighters, before being stored in valuable dockside space, move it again via trucks and pipes, then push it into gas stations or electrical power plants (where you lose yet more efficiency as it burns), than to pluck energy out of thin air and shunt it directly to consumers? All the fossil fuel industry has going for it is inertia.

However there has never been a mechanism to instantly make decisions as a group and have them ratified by whatever democratic process you choose before now. This is one of the reasons the internet is so important, its a new phenomenon, and one that clearly threatens entrenched concerns. There will always be respected spokepeople or what have you, but thats a lot different to executive leadership that doesn't have to justify its decisions. The vast majority might not want control, but the alternative is being led into whatever cattle pen to be dealth with by those who are not accountable as they see fit, so control they must ultimately have.

Will nobody rid us of these lawyer politicians, whose only understanding of communication is how it can be used to control others? For countless millenia, these fools have been holding back humanity, calling themselves priests, or the aristocracy, or the upper class, or whatever. Enough! Can we not have a "normal people's congress" on the internet or something. They want to control the internet? I say let the internet control them.

How did this get modded up. Intel has a lot of R&D jobs in Ireland, as do the pharmas; Viagra was invented in Cork. Chuckle up your sleeve at that one if you like, but its one hell of a money spinner. Not to mention much of that high tech industry is in Shannon, with its very own international airport. As for the incubators, most of the investment in the country was going into property, so that's that.